Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Big Cities Are High-Speed Rail’s Biggest Winners, Smaller Cities Maybe Not So Much

Public opinion may have turned against California’s high-speed rail plans — a recent survey found that a bare majority of Californians
now oppose the project, which has been buffeted by delays and cost
increases — but a number of cities throughout the state still support
it. For places like Fresno, San Jose and Palmdale, high-speed rail is
still seen as an economic lifeline.

Construction of the line would bring immediate job gains to, for
example, Fresno, where the first segment is planned to break ground
soon, assuming a judge’s recent ruling doesn’t throw it off. But will it
bring lasting economic growth?

Last month a group of California researchers released a meta-study in the journal Transport Reviews,
reviewing the literature on the effects of high-speed rail. The answer
is… definitely maybe. Two things, though, are clear: The benefits will
likely not be as large as predicted, and big, tier-one cities will
benefit the most.

“Predictive studies are largely optimistic of the rail’s positive
effects,” the authors write. “On the other hand, observational studies” —
those done after high-speed lines have opened — “tend to identify both
benefits and shortfalls.” The largest benefits, various studies found,
accrue to big cities. In California, this means San Francisco and Los
Angeles.

“The centralizing effect of HSR is now a well established impact,” wrote one set of researchers reviewing studies of lines built in Europe.

The main study’s authors concluded:

While there is some evidence to the contrary, and while non-central cities with HSR
appear to have fared better economically than those without it, the
scholarship that exists to date suggests that most growth and economic
benefits from HSR accrue to the first-tier
cities of the network, where firms are better positioned to expand their
reach in secondary markets and smaller cities. For this reason,
scholars have argued that HSR facilitates the territorial polarization between first- and second-tier cities.

Others looking at the effects of Japan’s Shinkansen found that the
country’s two most important cities, Tokyo and Osaka, gained in economic
primacy, at the expense of other cities with stations along the
high-speed corridor. Japanese cities without high-speed rail connections
were the biggest losers, another set of researchers found.

A third set of researchers, though, found that the Shinkansen’s
effects were muted, finding “only a negligible impact on development in
Japanese cities that had been well served by rail prior to Shinkansen.”
(This isn’t quite relevant to California, where there are no strong
existing rail links. It may mean that any potential high-speed rail
project on the Northeast Corridor, where rail already serves cities like
New York and Washington, may have minimal impacts.)

The success of high-speed rail in inducing development and job
growth in second-tier cities is mixed, but the studies point to a number
of things that cities can do to maximize growth potential. One survey
of high-speed rail experts found that, “the most important preconditions
for station-area development include central station location, good
integration of the station with its surroundings, station connectivity,
good level of service, and strong political will and vision.”

Fresno fulfills some of these criteria. The station will be downtown
— much to the chagrin of some project critics, who argue that serving
the downtowns of small cities adds costs out of proportion with their
benefits — and there appears to be strong political will and vision in
promoting development around the station.

Fresno does not, however, have good “station connectivity,“ or even
much mass transit at all. It’s not clear how many trains a day will stop
at the station, as opposed to speeding past on more profitable express
runs. (This also raises another question, which past experience cannot
answer: To what extent with the booming sound of passing trains, zipping
through town at unprecedented speeds for a developed urban area,
discourage people from locating near the station?)

One study “emphasize[d] the importance of coordinating land use
around stations through densification.” This could bode well for a city
like San Jose, which despite its largely suburban population does have
an established downtown core to densify, but may pose problems for
cities like Fresno in the Central Valley, which has no post-war history
of densification, and may be irredeemably auto-oriented.